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cross-institutional management. This is exemplified by the MELODIES,
OpenCube, and ENGAGE projects mentioned earlier.
New organizational
structures and business models have to be cocreated by all involved parties—
overcoming the “artificial” barriers between public sector and research communities.
2. Whereas culture, motivations, and approaches between the public sector
and academics and other research environments are extremely diverse, ICT
requirements are similar. Accordingly, available technical solutions from one
sector can meet the needs of the other. The remaining barrier is in sharing
and awareness raising. The example of Europeana, which combines technol-
ogy from diverse contexts (Linked Data, taxonomies, distributed catalogues,
and OAI-PMH), demonstrates that ICT requirements across communities
and domains are not as critical as the will to share data.
Diverse culture and
attitudes should not block
the sharing of available technical solutions, that is, data
models, software, and example applications. Practitioners in the public sector and
research have to leave their comfort zones and collaborate.
3. As much as open data are about technology, they are about governance.
Transparent licensing schemes and sustainable governance models for the
access, management, and maintenance of data are fundamental. This lesson
is illustrated by the lack of common open data policies and licensing scheme,
which have been identified as main obstacles in OpenAIRE and EUDAT.
Dialogues between the public sector and academics and other research environ-
ments have to be increased, starting from an identification of the communalities
and differences from a librarian's viewpoint.
4. Collection management is central to librarians. They are the connectors
between both worlds; although they are essential enablers for both the public
sector and research communities, their activities largely overlap. In addition,
each administrative unit hosts at least one librarian. For example, an early
attempt to build federated networks of connected libraries has been proven in
Europeana.
It is the time to practically exploit the ubiquity of libraries and the
established network of interrelated libraries (e.g., public, private, and university
libraries), along with their inherent expertise on data management, to go beyond
the traditional library services to reach the overall goal of transparent handling
and management of all kinds of data without boundaries.
5. Several possible solutions have been and are currently exploited, but the over-
all scenery is still fragmented. Commonalities have to be identified, and the
interoperability between available ICT architectures and developed compo-
nents and services has to be improved, with and between both domains. For
example, projects like DOPA (economic and finance open data) and EUDAT
(network of thematic research infrastructures) expose similar services that
could, by large, serve other projects and initiatives.
Operational success will
depend on the projection of case studies and experiments. Initial deployments
should be launched to identify common technology that could be used by both for
content discovery, management, and handling. The potential of general-purpose
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